WASHINGTON: Buried amidst the hundreds of pages of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014 is an unusually sharp rebuke to a high-profile program, the Navy’s controversial Littoral Combat Ship.

The defense policy bill has yet to pass the Senate, but assuming the current language stands – and there’s tremendous political pressure not to mess with the long-delayed NDAA – it will levy a host of requirements on the LCS program that go beyond the pro forma “give us a report” so common in defense bills. What the act doesn’t do, however, is slow the program down in any significant way, let alone impose the “pause” that the Government Accountability Office called for (very half-heartedly) in a recent study.